Re: Yes, but then again, No.
Given that we're already importing near continuously 3-6GW of leccy, a couple of extra full fat reactor sites won't be short of customers regardless of the bit barns existing or not.
2418 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2018
The VC25 is based on a 747-200 in the same way NASCAR racers are based on normal road cars - they only look similar.
Even if they were stock 747-200 models they've probably only done a small percentage value of the airframes designed flight cycles, taking over a decade building the replacements just shows how diabolically bad Boeing has become at doing bespoke work in house.
Reverse course ? - not a chance in Hades. The obvious* solution is for everyone to move absolutely everything into the cloud and never have to worry our little heads about such complicated problems again because our personal terminals will be updated automagically every time they sniff a connection.
* to those running the clouds
SMS is an old easily subverted communication method and like a postcard can be read by third parties with ease.
Current end to end encryption is near uncrackable* and that's safe enough until it gets removed because governments decide they really want to read your messages.
* Well known TLAs will neither confirm nor deny...
No, there's a much simpler solution which also addresses the problem of flatlining smart phone sales, one phone to display the QR code and another phone for the App & camera*
You are now forced to live your life with double the entry costs but at least you'll have a spare life tracker.
*hideously expensive flexible phones might be able to shortcut this...
Yes, the Concorde project was well under way before TSR-2 was canned. The afterburning Olympus (By Bristol out of R-R1) was picked for Concorde due to it being the most powerful domestic engine available on either side of the channel and also was already being developed with super cruise capability in the TSR-2. Concorde & TSR-2 being both Government funded basically allowed pushing the latest military engine design into a commercial airliner to (a) save a vast pile of development cash and (b) make it a viable proposition only four years after the first transtlantic jet flights! (Comet-4 & 707 in 19582)
You're also correct with the Marine & Static implementations, these were in parallel development with the aircraft engines because gas turbines can directly power anything previously using boiler+steam turbine sets plus they could go from cold start to full power in a fraction of the time.
1 Bristol & SNECMA collaborated on Concorde engine development, before R-R bought out Bristol.
2 Piston engined airliners were still carrying freight transatlantic in 1962.
The Parliament Act* is there to ensure that bills passed by the elected Commons cannot be blocked or radically changed by the unelected Lords. It's there to guarantee that elected members have the final say.
Blair's fox hunting law was passed with a large majority by the Commons, the Lords sent it back with amendments designed to gut most of the provisions, after it became clear that the Lords did not want to play ball he invoked the Parliament Act.
*invoked only about a dozen times since 1911
Parliament can be closed without it being asked because we simply don't want them voting extensions to their term of office. Cromwell for that very reason* shut it down to become a dictator in 1653.
Since the restoration, (in a very British compromise), Parliament is sovereign apart from the ability to decide when there has to be an election, that decision resides with the monarch who has for the last few hundred years acted on the advice of the PM.
*Cromwells actions are a really clear warning about power & corruption.
If the PM has the votes needed then that in itself IS parliamentary approval even if undisclosed ‘arrangements’ were made to facilitate the result.
The Churchillian quote on democracy ‘...Worst form of government apart from all those other forms that have been tried...’ will always ring true until we can find a way of selecting honest people capable of rational & critical thinking for the job.
The civil service will have already spotted that this will be used to remove them from the decision making process entirely.
I feel some ‘unforeseen circumstances’ will be arising to scupper this in the near future as the implementation process winds it way through Whitehall.
>>There are only 95 motorway services in the UK, yet somehow it works.<<
That's because you only need to have your wallet reamed once by the motorway fuel costs before learning to start every long trip with a full tank and then finding supermarket fuel stations if you need them.
Yes I'd go with non 4G protocols as a serious option from an engineering viewpoint. How much has technology changed during the last decade while we all waited for nothing to appear.
Successive governments eyeing the cash from 3/4/5G spectrum auctions were not inclined to add anything about making the thing work in an emergency, that would reduce the cash bids.
I think the pigeons will be very confused for a few mins before getting back to normal and I've no idea how they'll handle this in flight?
As for the power issue, write this into the license terms 'Will operate off mains power for a minimum of 24 hours' at whatever minimum capacity is required.
Cheap or Resilient - pick one.
Indeed. The PTT requirement changes the cell/phone 'tracking' system from the very low bandwidth regular update ping* into a permanent higher bandwidth open channel. This is a case where a 95% fit is no good when the other 5% is the killer application requirement!
The Government really needs to give up and just admit that replacing the Motorola bespoke emergency system requires another bespoke system more akin to military communications even if this ends up with a dedicated cell network.
*needed to immediately route incoming calls to the correct cell instead of spamming the entire network looking for 'fred' - that doesn't scale well with 10s of millions of handsets.
An excellent example of showing that to have real power all you need is money in vast amounts*, the movie industry using it to stifle competition by 'encouraging' laws in exactly the opposite way to IT companies that just ignore laws and stall court cases until fines are a balance sheet footnote and any 'ban on specific activity' has little relevance.
* Politicians looking for donations (and other perks) will appear with complementary agendas to aid these endeavours.
Adding you own open source software removes greatly reduces the chance that you're compromised at the OS level which will help keep non nation state level snoopers away BUT...
As was shown recently with Hezbollah pagers & walkie-talkies all going bang, compromising hardware is just as relevant and there's nothing you can do if 'special' additions have been made to any of the chip designs before they hit the FAB.